English for Italians and Vice Versa!

Benvenuti and Welcome!

Hi everyone, and welcome to my bi-lingual English Italian blog! Here you will find every post written firstly in English and then (badly!) in Italian. I welcome all your suggestions, comments, emails and (above all) your corrections!

giovedì 26 novembre 2009

Please excuse my prolonged absence…I’ve been very busy at work, and my husband and I are also renovating our house. I haven’t had the free time to update this blog, nor to speak to my Italian friends. I haven’t spoken Italian for over a year, let alone visited Italy, and as a consequence my Italian is really rusty…

I haven’t abandoned my Italian totally, however. I’m able to listen to the radio and to Italian audiobooks whilst I’m driving, and so I try to listen to some Italian every day. Compared with English, there aren’t many Italian audiobooks yet and it can be a little difficult to find them, and they’re also quite expensive. However, through iTunes I’ve managed to find some good books at lower prices, for example:

La Luna di Carta by Andrea Camilleri for £10.95 (5 hrs 50 mins)

Dracula by Bram Stoker for £6.95 (2 hrs 59 mins)....fantastic!

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson for £6.95 (2 hrs 4 mins)

In my opinion, the latter is a rather difficult and boring book to read in its original English, let alone in Italian…but as a source of almost forty hours of Italian for only £2.95 it’s a real bargain, despite the narrator’s rather annoying voice!

How lucky you Italians are! There are thousands of English audiobooks, and many of them are available for free on the internet. You can download them via iTunes (for example, all the Librivox podcasts), and listen to them for hours and hours…and there are also sites like Audible.co.uk, with lots of new and popular titles. I’m a little jealous…

mercoledì 28 gennaio 2009

When I first started reading Italian books a year or so ago, I set the bar way too high for myself. I figured I should be reading stuff like Dante’s Inferno or Boccaccio’s The Decameron, and it took me a while (and a fair share of demoralisation) to realise that that this was far too challenging a task for a beginner.

So, I set my sights a little lower, and started reading less challenging material, and that’s when I stumbled across Italian crime novels.

In England and America it’s customary for highbrows to turn their noses up at so-called ‘genre’ novels, i.e. those novels that can be slotted into a specific category such as thriller, sci-fi, horror, romance, crime, western, legal, historical and erotica.

Certainly, when I was an English undergraduate twenty years ago, we rarefied students never sullied our fingers by turning the pages of anything other than a timeless classic of English, American or European literature such as War and Peace or Great Expectations, or the modern ‘literary novel’ equivalent written by a lion of contemporary literature such as Salman Rushdie or JM Coetzee.

However, for language students there’s a lot to be said for reading genre novels to develop a familiarity for your target language. For starters, genre novels (especially those in the thriller, horror and crime genres) tend to use language that is more contemporary, accessible and colloquial than classic or literary novels, so readers run less risk of learning outdated and obsolete words and expressions. Also, given that prolific genre authors often publish a new novel every year or 18 months, their novels tend to be rooted in the here-and-now, with topical plot lines adding colour and verisimilitude to the work. This immediacy is fascinating for the foreign reader.

And this brings me to Quo Vadis, Baby by Grazia Verasani, which I finished reading this morning. This novel is a perfect example of what I’m talking about above. The language is accessible, the plot is intriguing, and the characters do normal, everyday things like smoke, drink, make love, fight, get drunk, fall down, cook dinner for their friends and argue with their parents. In a nutshell, the book was a joy to read from the first word to the last and I heartily recommend it to students of Italian everywhere! I’ve just bought another of Verasani’s books, called ‘Tutto Il Freddi Che Ho Preso’, and I can’t wait to start reading it!

domenica 25 gennaio 2009

I’m lucky enough to visit Italy at least 2 or 3 times a year, for up to 14 days at time, but this is still not the same as actually living there and immersing myself in the language and culture.

However, even in England I try to immerse myself in Italian as much as I can. I listen to Italian radio podcasts on my iPod, I read online Italian newspapers, I read Italian blogs and Italian novels and – whenever it’s possible – I change all my user interfaces to Italian.

What do I mean by ‘change my user interfaces’? Well, I mean that I change the language settings of things like my mobile phone, by iPod, my DVD player and my Sky receiver from English to Italian, so that all of the menus, functions, alerts, commands and notices are in Italian rather than in my native tongue. This gets me used to Italian words for things that I see everyday in English, such as settings (impostazioni), friends (amici), check mail (controlla la posta), edit (modifica), subscribe/join (iscriviti), search (ricerca), insert password (inserisci il codice), try again (riprova), invalid code (codice non valido), photos (immagini), calculator (calcolatrice), contacts (contatti), reset (ripristina) etc etc.

It’s amazing how seeing these words every day makes you remember them without any effort, almost by a sort of osmosis.

This option is also available in many of the social networking websites such as Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, Google, GoogleReader, iTalki, Word Reference, Shared Talk etc, so that all of the administrative functions and welcome messages etc. can be switched from English to Italian.

Using Shared Talk as an example, the welcome message to new members in English is as follows:

Shared Talk is a community of people from all around the world and is dedicated to language exchange and language learning. We are working to provide you with the best tools that can easily help you learn and practice foreign languages. Shared Talk is willing to offer help and tools to learn and practice foreign languages. It is mainly based on language exchange and is founded on its community. People in the community want to learn foreign languages and share their knowledge of their native language.

So what else do I do to introduce as much Italian as possible into my daily life?

Well, I’m not sure that this is the same in every country, but certainly in England if you buy any electrical or electronic item it arrives accompanied by an instruction booklet about 100 pages thick, of which only 2 pages are written in English, and all the rest are in every language under the sun, from Arabic to Yiddish. Before I started learning Italian I’d automatically read the English pages, but now I immediately turn to the Italian pages and see whether I can understand everything in Italian first, before I then turn to my native language to check my understanding.

In fact, if there’s Italian writing anywhere on the packaging of anything I buy, I read that first, and only turn to the English version to clarify my comprehension.

And good quality English language Italian cookbooks can also be a treasure trove of Italian culinary expressions, food related words etc…even if the recipe is written completely in English, often at least the title of the dish is written in both English and Italian…absorbing these can be a great help when ordering from an Italian menu when you’re actually in Italy….

Shared Talk is a community of people from all around the world and is dedicated to language exchange and language learning. We are working to provide you with the best tools that can easily help you learn and practice foreign languages. Shared Talk is willing to offer help and tools to learn and practice foreign languages. It is mainly based on language exchange and is founded on its community. People in the community want to learn foreign languages and share their knowledge of their native language.

giovedì 22 gennaio 2009

Given that it takes me around 2 weeks to read each book, I think I've practically enough material to last me a year! I've bought all of my DVDs from the Italian section at Amazon.co.uk, where there's a pretty good choice at decent prices, and I buy all of my books either in person when I go to Rome (I have very heavy hand luggage!) or through IBS.it, where the quality of service and delivery to England is always wonderful.

It IS possible to watch Italian films free on the internet if you go to Videogratis.com, but you need a high speed broadband connection to make it worthwhile. Otherwise, you're better off going to your local library and renting Italian DVDs, or saving your pennies and starting your own collection.

My local art house cinema shows the occasional Italian film too, and in the past year I've seen Gomorrah, Quiet Chaos and The Bicycle Thieves there, and I'm looking forward to seeing Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo later this month. Sorrentino is my favourite Italian director (so far!) and his Consequences of Love is my favourite film (also so far). Italian cinema (at least the little of it that I've seen) is much more visual, thoughtful and multi-layered than the usual mainstream Hollywood fare, and I'm looking forward to deepening my acquaintance with it!

venerdì 16 gennaio 2009

I received some bad news earlier this week, which may mean that I have less time available to update this blog. In order to gain something positive from the situation, I thought I'd explain it using as many English idioms as possible, and then see whether, when completing the translation, I can find an equivalent Italian idiom. It will be interesting to see whether I can recreate in Italian the colourful vibrancy that the idioms lend to the English original. I'll highlight the idioms in bold so that you can spot them easily

OK, I'll stop beating around the bush and cut to the chase. My mum was diagnosed with bowel cancer a while ago, and now she must have an operation to remove a large part of her intestines. At 80 years old she's no spring chicken, so I'm tearing my hair out with worry about her, and keeping my fingers crossed that things will come up roses. Though she's a bit long in the tooth she's also as tough as old boots, and she won't throw in the towel without a fight. She said that she has no intention of popping her clogs any time soon, and in no time she'll beas right as rain and as fit as a fiddle. Though she may feel like death warmed up for the first couple of days after the surgery, she'll soon be fighting fit again and champing at the bit to get home.

My dad has put on a brave face and is trying to look on the bright side. He says a few days in hospital will finally stop mum from rushing around like a headless chicken and force her to look after number one for a change. But we all know that getting mum to slow down will be easier said than done, because a leopard can't change its spots. Mum's old school. She believes thatthe devil makes work for idle hands, so she's always on the go. I hope she takes plenty of rest to recover her strength, but you can't teach an old dog new tricks, and trying to change her now will be like flogging a dead horse or talking to a brick wall. It goes against the grain for her to rest, so I guess dad and I will just have to bite our tongues and hope for the best.

Luckily my husband and I upped sticks and moved closer to my parents just before Christmas, so at least we'll be on the doorstep and able to lend a helping hand, if the going gets tough. I know that worrying is as much use as a chocolate teapot so I'm trying to be positive and keep a stiff upper lip...but it's not easy!

sabato 10 gennaio 2009

Hi, just a short post to tell students of Italian living in the UK that Film4 is showing the film I'm Not Scared(Io Non Ho Paura) on Saturday 17th January at 1.45am. This is a great modern film (my husband bought me the DVD for Christmas!) with dialogue that is relatively easy to follow (though Film 4 will obviously include Italian subtitles). One to enjoy!